Why Fundy-St. Martins is shooting for the stars to legitimize its dark sky corridor What does it take to protect views of the starry realms? Paperwork — lots of it. Elaine Shannon waits for darkness to walk the ocean floor. From her home in Fundy-St Martins, a village along New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy coastline, she makes a daily pilgrimage to the shore. When the tide goes out, she travels the mudflats as far as she can before hitting the water. Then, she looks up. The deep, powerful darkness of the area, beloved by Shannon and others in her community, is more than a backdrop to whimsical stargazing; it’s a commodity nearing extinction across North America. Light pollution doubles every 10 years and has brightened the Earth by an overall 16 per cent since 2014, according to a study of satellite imagery, though individual regions are improving. It’s why Shannon helped spearhead the Dark Sky Corridor, a project that aims to connect six dark sky sites across 180 kilometres of the Fundy coast. Once complete, it will be the highest concentration of dark sky sites in the world. Since announcing the project last summer, a committee has been working on a legal framework to enshrine that protection, especially against future development. A light pollution bylaw is just one item on seven pages of requirements municipalities must fulfill to achieve accreditation from DarkSky International, the organization that certifies dark sky locations on a global scale. “We are going for the hardest [accreditation] to achieve,” Shannon said. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada is the body that traditionally certifies dark sky sites in Canada. It’s approaching 30 sites across the country, including four in New Brunswick: three dark sky preserves in Mount Carleton Provincial Park, Fundy National Park and Kouchibouguac National Park, and an urban star park at the Irving Nature Park in Saint John. The society’s accreditation process is not as extensive as DarkSky International’s — Fundy-St. Martins's final application to DarkSky could run up to 120 pages. Fortunately, Shannon said, there are footsteps to follow. DarkSky International has accredited just one other municipality in Canada: the Town of Bon Accord in Alberta. The person in charge of Bon Accord project 10 years ago heard about the Fundy-St. Martins corridor on the news and sent Shannon a message on LinkedIn saying, “I’d really like to help you.” “He literally handed us his package that [the Town of Bon Accord] presented to DarkSky International, which included their bylaws,” Shannon said. A lot changes in 10 years, though. Shannon, who’s also the president of the St. Martins and District Chamber of Commerce, said the organization used Bon Accord’s bylaw as a guide to make something “palatable” for the village. The chamber presented a bylaw draft to Fundy-St. Martins council in February, but with the May 11 municipal election looming, Shannon said councillors weren’t comfortable starting a process that couldn’t be finished before the swearing-in of a new council. The chamber will present the bylaw to the new council in July, and Shannon hopes it will be enacted within a year. The bylaw, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. Fundy-St. Martins will also have to provide DarkSky International with a light policy plan, a leisure plan, scientific data and then, post-accreditation, annual reports. “It's like eating an elephant. We're taking it one bite at a time,” said Stéphane Picard, an astrophotographer and astrotourism consultant involved in the project. This month, Picard is travelling to different sites around Fundy-St. Martins to gather light pollution measurements for the application. Using a sky quality meter, he’s recording where the village falls on the Bortle scale, which ranks the brightness of an area from one to nine. Fundy-St. Martins falls between a two and a three, Picard said, well above cities like Toronto that come in at nine. But prime darkness can be found throughout New Brunswick — it’s mostly forested — and Picard isn’t stopping with the Fundy coast. He’s helping Neqotkuk First Nation get an accreditation, and he said Miramichi and Neguac have urban star parks in the works. It would be easier to get certifications from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, but Picard said that extra seal of approval from DarkSky International will not only super power an astrotourism industry in New Brunswick but also act as a conduit to the rest of the world’s star-lovers. “Once we get the accreditation, that's like planting the fire, and people will pay attention to that,” he said. “They'll know that it gives legitimacy to the dark skies of the community.” Communities can lose their accreditation if they fall below DarkSky’s standards, so the application is a long-term commitment. Shannon hopes that commitment will last seven generations and beyond, especially for her newborn grandson. She dreams he will one day walk the beach by her house, breathe in the same earthy smell of the mudflats, hear birds swooping through darkness as they travel ancient migratory routes, look up and see the Milky Way swirling in the sky as he plays in her backyard below. “We’re this tiny planet, right? Hurling through space. It humbles you; it brings you back to the point of the whole thing,” she said.